The Hand That Feeds
by docturlough
Summary: When The Punisher is arrested, it sets off a chain reaction through the street-level characters of New York, as they uncover a conspiracy that goes deeper than any of them can imagine. Featuring a variety of character viewpoints, from She-Hulk to Daredevil, Luke Cage to Black Cat and MORE!
1. Chapter 1: She-Hulk

There was no echo as she walked. The hallways were unpolished, the paint on the walls peeling. The entire building looked like it hadn't been touched since the mid-90's. Until you reached the second floor, which was immaculately clean on the outside, the door varnished and the frosted window emblazoned: _Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys at Law. _

She half-stooped to enter the doorway, her Amazonian stature not suited to the cramped Hell's Kitchen. Inside, papers were piled halfway to the ceiling, and a new secretary (there seemed to be a different one every year) was diligently typing away, attempting to ease the chaos that was the lawyers' workload. Pacing through the labyrinth of court orders was Foggy Nelson, who stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her.

"J-Jen!" he exclaimed, observing her in awe.

Her hair was tied back, business-like, but her attire was a simple blouse and a pair of tight jeans. You'd mistake her for any passer-by in New York, if it weren't for her bright emerald skin.

"Hey, Foggy, is he here?" Jennifer Walters smiled.

Foggy's expression fell as he realized she was here for Matt, as most beautiful women were when they darkened their door.

"Sorry."

"Any idea?"

"Nope. Your guess is as good as mine. If you see him, tell him to get his butt over here, we're drowning in this stuff."

"Ah." she sighed. "I may have to add to your caseload."

"Is it any good?" the portly lawyer quizzed.

"I don't have all the details yet. Let me get Matt and we'll talk over coffee." She turned to leave, "See you later, Foggy!"

The door closed, Foggy was still for a moment, before collapsing, sighing wistfully, into a chair which his secretary raced to catch him in.

"Isn't she wonderful?" he smiled.

Outside, Jen entered the cold, narrow streets of Hell's Kitchen and bristled at it. She knew good people lived here. Good families, trying to get by, but she couldn't help it. A place like Hell's Kitchen would make anyone turn their collar up or hold their wallet a little tighter.

She stepped into the adjacent alley, keeping her eyes up, trying to spot a red blur on the rooftops above. She was so engrossed in her search that she failed to notice another person in the alley, until she collided with him.

"Oh! I'm sorry!" She said, gripping the person before they hit the ground. They were bundled in heavy coat, muffled behind a thick scarf, and hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat, which had miraculously survived the collision.

"Not a problem, doll." the Brooklyn accent rasped. "Say, you ain't the She-Hulk?"

"Not on the weekdays, buddy." Jen answered, smiling as she walked away.

"You here to see Daredevil?" he called after her.

"He's not Daredevil!" she tried her best to conceal Matt's already-public identity, "But yeah."

"Well, if you see him, tell him I got something for him!"

She turned to finish the shouting conversation, but before once she did, two hands gripped her shoulders, hard. She saw the arms that held her lead into the man's sleeves, on the other end of the alley, were a telescopic steel contraption.

_Oh, you've got to be kidding me, _she thought. "Stilt-Man!?"

"The very same!" the minor, laughing stock of a villain yelled in triumph.

Inside his arms, servos began to spin, pulling She-Hulk toward him. She dug her feet into the earth, and stopped him in his tracks. For a long second they stood there, neither moving, neither flinching. Until Jen gripped Stilt-Man's wrist and lifted him off his feet. His arms collapsed in on themselves at breakneck speed as he shot towards her.

She fired a devastating punch to his head, and he shot high into the air. She leaped at a nearby fire escape, racing to catch him halfway down, but he fired up his extending legs and stomped on the top of the fire escape. Old and rickety, the iron had no chance against his onslaught and collapsed. Jen's wrist was trapped instantly, and she was pulled into the collapsing structure.

Stirring her head, she recovered quickly and pushed a half-ton of metal off herself with little effort. She flung a warped chunk of the fire escape at the 30-foot leg in front of her, and ruptured it at the knee.

Stilt-Man came down fast, but his arm came down faster, striking the ground like a lightening. Jen leaped to the side to avoid the strike, but another quick whip flattened every trashcan on that side of the alley, as well as sending her into a She-Hulk-shaped crater in the wall.

She grabbed the arm as it contracted, pulling Stilt-Man to her again. He may be laughable, but he wasn't dumb, and he was able to disengage her grip before she reached him. She brought her heavy green fist down at his head, but he crossed his arms and blocked, then folded his arms over her hand, trapping her.

He twisted her wrist hard, and she cried out, not expecting such a strike from a minor nuisance. She smacked him upside the head with her other hand, jarring him for a moment, before she brought it down on top of her bindings. The arms kinked beneath her strike, but not enough to let her go.

She-Hulk grabbed hold of the arm, and crushed it against her trapped forearm. The metal buckled and locked in place, unmoving. Inside his suit, Stilt-Man tried to retract his arms, to no avail. He looked at the forest-skinned femme fatale with panic in his visored eyes, and she just smirked at him.

She picked him up by his tangled pretzel arms and swung him against the wall of the alley, then against the opposite wall. Then back again for good measure. When she set him on his feet, she tore his extend-O-arms out of their sockets. He lifted his uninjured leg to strike her, but her heavy (yet fricking gorgeous) boot met his chest quicker, and he was launched 50-feet into a pile of week-old trash.

Jen sauntered up to him. She had no need to rush, given that he was currently slipping on garbage juice in a futile attempt to stand. As he slid into the black bags again, she gripped him by the helmet and lifted him to head-height.

"Why are you attacking me?" she asked flatly.

"Don't know what you're talkin' about."

"Seriously? _Seriously?_ That's what you're going for?"

He remained tight-lipped.

"I'm going to smash you into more walls, unless you tell me something that makes me happy."

His face contorted slightly. Less "stoic scowl", more "I want my mommy".

She swung him fast, stopping just before his skull caved in the pavement.

"Ohgodnopleasestopdonhurtme!" He babbled. And continued babbling. She had to slap him to get him to shut up.

"Okay. Let's start again. Hi, I'm She-Hulk. Who hired you?" she smiled sweetly at him, but her grip tightened.

"I dunno, man, honest! A guy came up to me while I'm flippin' burgers at this joint on 9th Avenue, tells me to kill Daredevil, gives me $10,000 in cash, buys a Pepsi and leaves! What do you want from me!?"

"A believable story, for one!" she rattled him.

"That's my story and I'm sticking to it!" he squealed, "It's the truth!"

She nodded, understanding, then slammed him into a wall. Stilt-Man crumbled to the ground, unconscious, as She-Hulk accepted his story as fact. Hell, this guy was hardly the brains behind the operation, assuming this attack was even connected to the issue she needed to speak with Matt about. Could just be your run-of-the-mill super-powered lawyer killing.

Someone she could ask, though, would be the scarlet streak that darted across the sky above the alley just then. Jen turned and strode back into Nelson and Murdock's cramped high-rise office, nearly giving Foggy another heart attack with her smile, before she pushed past him and into Matt's office, where she found him with his suit pants halfway up over his red pyjamas.

"Hi, Jen. Don't suppose you have an appointment?" The redhead smiled. His eyes radiated warmth, despite the fact that they were almost completely milk-white. He put his sunglasses on, buttoned up his shirt, and took a seat at his desk.

"Actually, Matt," Foggy began, following her into the office, flanked by the secretary who was armed with a tray of coffee, "Jen's here to talk to us about a case."

"Huh. It's not often one of New York's premier counsellors comes down to talk to us street-level types. Has something happened?"

"Needed your experience with a client. The Punisher was arrested last night." Jen laid the facts out plain, having never been one for theatrics.

"What'd he do?" Matt asked, a single eyebrow arching into his forehead.

"What is he _accused _of doing?" Foggy corrected his friend.

"Oh, no, he totally did it." Jennifer said. "If it's Punisher, you can be sure he did it. Last night, he stormed a penthouse in Soho, killed 10 people who'd been living there. It was a makeshift barracks for The Hand."

"The Hand?" Foggy asked. "The Hand are back in New York?"

"The Hand probably never left New York." Matt stated, "What worries me is that Frank got caught. Frank doesn't get caught."

"Well, he got caught this time. Boys in blue were on the scene within five minutes."

"Five minutes?" Matt blurted, incredulous. "In Soho? Not a chance. This is some kind of fix."

"That's what I thought. But he won't tell me who gave him the tip-off, won't tell me about his planning the attack, won't even give testimony. He just sort of, sits there…" Jen trailed off, looking absent-mindedly at her coffee.

"He's been to prison before. He knows how to bide his time until he can make an escape. He knows he's done for, and he's preparing himself." Matt spoke matter-of-factly when he spoke about The Punisher. Not his usual, caring self at all.

"I dunno about this case, Matt. I know he's not innocent, he's unrepentant, and he has almost no sense of limitations to do what he thinks is right. He killed people. They weren't good people, but he killed them." Jennifer still couldn't meet his eyes, even if he was blind.

"I know, Jen. Frank inspires this kind of duality in people. He's what we would be if we didn't have conscience." The softness had returned to his voice.

"So you gotta do what you think is right," Foggy piped up, "if you don't think you can represent him, then you can transfer. But if you choose to go for it, you gotta go for it with everything you got."

"I know he's going away, there's nothing I can do about that. The Punisher knows it too. But I still don't think that would be justice."

"What do you have in mind, Counsellor?" Matt asked.

"I want to find the guys who set him up. I want to bring them down with him. At least then there'll be some balance to all this." Jen downed the last of her coffee, tasting where the sugar had set.

"So that's why you came to see me?"

"No." Jennifer said, "Not exactly. You've represented him before. You've stood by him. You've even worked with him on occasion…"

"When the time called for it, and under strict supervision." Matt interjected.

"Yeah, but you did. I wanted you to tell me that I was doing the right thing, Matt. I didn't know where The Punisher falls in this whole heroes-and-villains world."

"He doesn't fall anywhere. He's going to pay for what he does, one day. Hell, he pays for it every day."

"So you'll take the case?" Jen smiled.

"Daredevil will take the case." Matt returned her smile. Somehow it means more coming from Matt, when you know he's can't be mimicking your smile to make you feel better.

He stood, and walked to the other side of the desk, placing his hand on her broad shoulder.

"Matt Murdock, though, wants to tell you that you're doing the right thing. This is how it's meant to go, Jen."

She gripped his hand and smiled wider. Foggy just downed his coffee, the awkward third wheel.


	2. Chapter 2: Daredevil

_The cast-iron rooftops sound like a church bell beneath my footfalls. _

_Each step sends reverberations through the air in every direction, through the echo chamber of every alley, and around every object. I can see all of Soho. Gaining speed, I feel the wind rushing around my body change direction, and I know the edge of the rooftop is 9.4 feet from the edge of my boot. _

_I pick up the pace and leap into the air. The image that I have in my mind, the sonar picture of the iron sound, dissipates with the next breeze, and the texture of every object I perceive is totally different when it's made from the wind's noise. It's like the whole world is being scrawled with different handwriting. Like going from Van Gogh to Rembrandt. _

_A building made up of ten-thousand, two-hundred bricks comes out of the blackness and catches me like a caring mother. I roll across the rooftop, then spring over the edge, back into open air. I navigate through the inside of a fire escape without touching a single rung of a single ladder, until I grip the very bottom one, bringing me to a gentle stop on the pavement. The fire escape creaks and illustrates the whole street to me in pristine detail. _

_There's nobody here._

_A street in New York, at mid-day, completely abandoned. _

_That's enough even to spook a man without fear. _

_I step across the street slowly. Beneath me, dirty water runs through sewers. Three blocks over, a car pulls up and a woman runs into her house, crying. In front of me, an apartment with no windows smells like charcoal._

_The entire building was empty, and this converted penthouse was where all those men slept, ate, drank, and trained. Trained for what? There's stale sweat on the surviving floor, it smells like fried meat. The ceiling is low, and halfway through the room, it goes from smooth to warped and burned. Frank really did a number on these people. _

_In the door frame, there's 5 indentations where the .22 bullet casings from his Uzi struck. 100 nuances and subtler markings contributing to the 5 shapes. He fired for 10 seconds. But he didn't kill everyone in that time. _

_These men were Hand. They don't die easy. It's hard to piece together what happened, the damage to the room is so extensive. But The Punisher is hardly a man to destroy evidence, because evidence of cruelty brings fear. Frank loves fear. _

_So we can assume that some people avoided his bullets, maybe even disarmed him from a distance. I take out my billy club, it feels familiar through my glove. I give the radiator a slight tap, and it shows me every nook and cranny in the room. There's a shiruken under the cupboard in the corner. _

_So someone disarms Frank, moves for a bigger weapon. But he's not in the mood tonight. No time for ninjas and magic and weird crap. He throws an incendiary grenade onto the table. Table? Table. There's four pieces of wood scattered around the room. All the same wood, shaped by the same machine. _

_Information piles atop information as my sonar sense feeds me, and my mind arranges the facts to fit the scenario. The ninjas are eating. They've just trained. Frank comes in. Bang. Disarmed. Grenade. Everybody's dead. _

_So why doesn't he run? Why doesn't he just turn around and get out the door? I leave the apartment, retracing what I think would be his next steps. Down the stairs, outside. He doesn't go out the front door, not after that. According to the reports, he has about three minutes to get out of here. Even if he thought he had all the time in the world, nobody just waits around after they firebomb a building. _

_So he's down the stairs. I can smell him, stronger now since I filtered out the charcoal. He smells like blood and Wild Turkey. He doesn't sweat. He's calm. He shoots something._

_What? _

_There's nothing here to shoot. There was no other body. I snap my fingers, giving me the full layout of the hall. There's no bullet-hole, no entry point. But there's a casing by the door, and beneath the charcoal and the blood, there's gunpowder. _

_Wait. Blood. _

_Frank's blood. It wasn't just old blood on his dirty clothes, its new blood. There's no carpet on these stairs, just that cheap plastic stuff that looks like marble. If you're blind. But it's easier to clean than marble. Doesn't stain the same. _

_Someone shot Frank on this staircase. Then cleaned it up. Who?_

_I walk over to the casing, and pick it up between my index finger and thumb. I can feel the curve of the brass, the kinks at the head where the bullet burst out. The thin coating of soot around the burst percussion cap, and the inscription beneath "9x19mm" most commonly used in a Glock 19 pistol. NYPD standard issue. _

_The police were here as soon as Frank killed those men. Maybe even before. They were waiting. _

_An hour later, I'm halfway across the city, in an alley off Madison Avenue, in the shadow of the Daily Bugle offices. Jonah Jameson's squinting, grimacing eye watches to whole city from here, and if you leap across these buildings in a costume, you can practically feel his gaze boring into your skull with pure, seething hatred._

_It's just starting to rain when I step into the alley, and as the wind picks up and whistles ominously, I catch his scent. Sweat and tobacco, bad cologne and hot dogs. Ben Urich. I step from the shadows as he lights a cigarette. _

"_How you been, Urich?"_

"_Dammit, Matt. If Jameson sees me skulking around his turf, he'll accuse Frontline of plagiarism." _

_I grin a little, "One of you are going to have to write something worth plagiarising first."_

_The smoke smells a little different, richer, thicker. There's less chemicals in it today. _

"_I brought copies of all the cases I've worked recently. I wasn't really sure what it is you wanted." He paused for a moment. "Castle really got himself locked up, huh?"_

_He holds out the files, and I reach for them._

"_Afraid so, Ben. I don't know exactly what it is I need, either. The Hand is rearing its head again."_

_Ben pulls the file back a little before I reach them. His heart-rate skips._

"_Matt…I don't want to get mixed up in something that big."_

"_What's the matter, Ben? You were never one to shy away from something like this." His nerves rile up a little more, adrenaline hits his bloodstream._

"_Matt, it's just… I can't be a part of this one. I can't give you this info."_

_He's saying something without saying it. Urich's a better liar than this. He wants me to figure out where he's going. Wants me to know, but can't say. _

"_New cigarettes, Urich? Little more expensive than your regular brand."_

"_Yeah, I found a few dollars behind my couch." He smiles. I got it._

_I start scanning for noises I lost before. There's traffic outside, echoing in the alley. There's vents and air conditioners and rats scuttling around. There's two men breathing, and there's something electrical on one man's belt. _

_He's wearing a wire._

_They paid him to stay out of this._

_But he's still in it. _

_Of course, he's Ben Urich._

"_I understand, Ben. I won't force you into something you don't want. I say we just go our separate ways, if there's nothing we can do for each other."_

_He sets the files on a trashcan, and my radar tells me he's looking into my eyes, knowingly. He takes a copy, a fake file, from under his coat, and moves to walk out of the alley._

_Then the air shifts. The cool breeze splinters like thin ice as a foreign object enters into it._

"_Ben, look out!" I yell, throwing my billy club through the air. It intersects with the object; a dart, I see in the sound-waves of the impact, inches away from Urich's neck. Ben breaks into a sprint, his smoker's lungs taking him as quickly as he can down East 52__nd__ Street._

_Something overhead leaps across the open top of the alley, moving parallel to Urich. I don't have the time to get on the level with it before it reaches him, so I do the dumbest thing you can do when you're trying to lay low: I shove the folder into a trashcan and run out onto the open street in a bright red costume._

_I burst through a crowd of NYC hustle-and-bustle, leaping directly into traffic. I feel the vibrations of the asphalt and the fumes in the air, telling me where each and every vehicle on the road is. The fastest moving car within a hundred yards crosses my path in 2.4 seconds, and I leap onto the roof, riding on the top of it despite the driver's muffled yells of complaint. I can't find the assailant on the rooftop. I have no idea where he's coming from, but I've caught up with Ben, and that's all I needed._

_The air in the alley he's about to pass puckers and shifts with movement, and I leap over his head, colliding boot-first with a Hand ninja. _

_The ninja, clad in red wrappings with a katana strapped to his back, goes sprawling into a deep puddle of waste water, and I'm behind him before he's got his bearings. I've lost one billy club, so I only have my grappling hook left, but it's worth sacrificing, because I've taken on Hand assassins before, and you want to neutralize them as quick as possible. _

_I fire the hook at a window, smashing it. I press the button to reel the cable in, and clout the ninja across the back of the head with the club before he turns. Despite his doubtless loss of balance, he swings a mean kick into my side, and starts moving in on me, while I feign defence._

_He swings a fist, and I catch him by his wrist, wrapping the rapidly-receding cable around it. He reaches for his sword, but before he gets it out he's been pulled, full force, into broken glass and hard brick, and I hear his arm break in two places._

_He lands, now holding my club in one hand and his sword in the other. The club hand is useless. He's just threatening me with my own weapon, intimidation tactic. He knows it, and lets me make the first move. I leap, swinging a kick for his head, but he ducks beneath it, trying to stab upwards at me._

_I knew exactly what he was doing, and I kick off the wall, back over him again. He spins, bringing his sword in an arc that would normally take my head off, but a well-timed duck and swift kick to his thigh ruins that plan. _

_A ninja is a perfect symphony of muscle and discipline. They move as they need to move, eliminating obstacles to achieve results as directly and efficiently as possible. But for a ninja to come up against someone like me, someone who can hear an off-tune string in a hundred-piece orchestra? It's disastrous. It becomes less about the goal, and more about the method, which is an almost complete reversal of the ninja's way._

_The guy mulls on this as he shrinks back, rethinking tactics as we face each other again._

_He throws my billy club by at my head, faster than I've ever thrown it. But that arm is still injured, so the throw has no finesse, no intent behind it. I snatch the thing out of the air and use it to block his real attack, the sword that was going for my chest. He whips his limp, broken arm at me and I block easily, then he hops into the air, bringing a strong, well-aimed foot directly into my throat. Occupied with two other attacks, I've got no hands to block it, and I end up choking. I wrap my hand around his sword and pull it away from him, losing my billy club as well as I back up, on defence for real this time._

_He jumps, slamming both feet into my chest with a double front kick, winding me even further and cracking a few ribs. He doesn't waste the opportunity he's got, and starts raining blows and kicks down on me, pushing me back until I hit the wall, which then starts attacking me from the opposite side as his impacts slam me into it over and over. His seventh kick is to the head, and I black out for a second, before he brings the foot back from the other side and wakes me up again._

_I can't get my bearings; his strikes are all goal-oriented now. There's nothing to stop them. I block as many as I can, but as I get weaker and weaker they get less effective. Before what I think might be the final strike, a good Samaritan steps off the street and slams the ninja with a devastating right cross to his jaw._

_My first instinct is to get between them, protect the innocent from the deadly assassin. But then a human-shaped heap of red robes falls unconscious beside me, and it doesn't take me long to figure out why. Very few people stay awake after a direct hit from Luke Cage._

_I grin through bloody lips, and he helps me to my feet._

"_I thought our meeting wasn't until 4?" I breathe._

"_Cute." He smiles warmly, "I was in this part of town, and I heard someone spotted Daredevil surfing traffic. Thought I'd check it out."_

_I look out of the alley and see little Danielle, all chirpy and wide-eyed, in the car seat of the Soccer-mom-mobile parked on the curb. She gives me a little wave and I wave back._

"_Fastest way to travel."_

"_Uh-huh. So what's the story here?"_

"No_, agh_." I grunt, pain shooting through my side. "No story here, the story's in the next alley. If you can give me a lift."

_Luke pats me on the back with such strength that I nearly collapse, and while I collect my billy club, he wraps a discarded pipe around the Hand agent's wrists, before throwing him in the passenger seat._

"Whoosat, Daddy?" _Danielle asks._

"A bad man, baby."

"Bamman! Bamman!"


End file.
